August 13, 2007

My day

The first of multiple weird, annoying, and/or weirdly annoying things to happen today started with traffic on the way to work. I was already late, having taken longer to wake up and get ready than usual, but then I ran into a huge block of traffic inching forward on the route I take. I jumped off and took side roads, which really threw me off – I know it was faster than sitting in the traffic, but my internal clock kept ticking away, telling me how late I was becoming because of the “short cut.”

Then I found myself far hungrier than usual and ate part of my lunch, figuring I could substitute it with a bag of Skittles, which has become a strange addiction of mine lately. I can’t deny my desire to catch the rainbow of fruit flavors.

In the meantime, my computer freaked out while I was moving a rectangle in Illustrator, causing each movement to leave ghost-images of the rectangle all over my screen. And then my mouse died – completely died. No shining red laser light from underneath, no movement on the screen. I did a Print-Screen of my disaster, alt-tabbed to Outlook, opened a new email, and emailed the screen grab to myself for later submittal to our managers as more evidence of why we desperately need newer, faster, stronger computers.

Just before lunch, I stopped off at the restroom and next to me in the stall is a dude who was apparently mostly naked. His pants were crumpled up on the floor with what I believe was his underwear, his shoes were off, and all of this was almost in my stall. Oh, and he’s making weird noises in there. I can’t even guess what was going on in there, but I wanted to imagine that he had wet-wipes and was cleaning something off, because it sounded sort of like that. I also thought maybe he was just coming back from working out and was changing. I didn’t want to know, but there are some combinations of weird goings-on that leave you helpless but to wonder.

When I finished washing my hands and was about to leave, the guy came out of the stall and it was just him – no bag or extra clothes, nothing extra, but at least he was dressed. I can’t imagine what was going on in there, and I really, really want to stop trying to do so. It’s not happening.

Then I went to our breakroom to get Skittles. I tried to get Skittles, at least. I put my money in the vending machine, made the selection, and watched as the screw-type thing that holds the bag turned and pushed the Skittles out off the shelf. And then it stopped, and the bag just hung there. I tried jiggling the machine but it wouldn’t budge. Another guy I know came in right then and we both tried to knock it down, but it wouldn’t move. He gave it a shove on the side and instead of the Skittles, a bag of peanut M&Ms randomly fell out. I can’t eat those (because chocolate, while delicious and wonderful, is one of my migraine foes,) so I gave up and invested another 75 cents in Skittles to get at least the one bag out. At this point, I was willing to sacrifice one bag of Skittles for another, being able to predict the outcome: A couple of weeks ago, this same chain of events happened and I wound up losing 75 cents on another bag of Skittles that got stuck pushing the previously stuck one out.

This time, however, both bags dropped and I had to walk back to my desk holding THREE bags of candy. I felt a bit like a pig. “Look at all the candy I’m going to eat!” I guess, in a roundabout way, I got my 75 cents worth of candy back from a couple weeks ago in the form of those M&Ms. So now Alissa gets a bag of the peanut M&Ms she so loves, and, apparently, I have extra Skittles for another day.